Children living in multilingual communities often learn in a language at school that does not match the language they speak at home. This mismatch makes it challenging for them to participate in classroom discussions and learn to read. In turn, this contributes to poor learning outcomes, grade repetition, and dropping out of school.
These countries are former French colonies or territories. French is the official or working language and often the language of instruction in school. However, these countries are highly multilingual. About 23 living But a lack of resources, and a failure to take into account local conditions, affected the outcomes. The programmes that resulted in positive schooling and learning outcomes recognised and targeted common school-related and community-related challenges.programme in Mali, for example, ensured teachers had materials in both French and the mother tongue. Children had better French and maths scores.
The same programmes sometimes experienced different outcomes depending on the community. For example, although children in Burkina Faso's bilingual schooling showed favourable outcomes,Efforts to provide teachers with the resources they needed, and efforts to foster community support, were both consistently linked with positive schooling and learning outcomes in our review.